  Born the son of a Ford foundry worker, John DeLorean rose to become heir-apparent of the General Motors dynasty. In 1973, he quit GM to start DeLorean Motor Company. This film, shot 1979-81, is an inside view of DeLorean and his team as they take his vision of a stainless steel gull-wing-door car from the board room to the assembly line in Belfast, Northern Ireland. His new sports car would be the first new American car design in memory. When British Television (ATV) asked us to make a film in Ireland we envisioned misty Sligo and Yeats poetry set to music. However, when we heard that John DeLorean was thinking of setting up his factory in Northern Ireland we forget our Leprechaun fantasy and began our great automotive adventure. |
It was an adventure that took us to the auto show in Geneva, where John and wife, Christina Ferrare, showed his new car for the first time to the excited world of car buffs; to car-designer Giorgetto Giugiaro’s huge studio-factory in Milan where full-size wooden replicas of Lotuses, Ferraris and now DeLorean’s design-accurate model are locked away in secret vaults accessible only to a designated few; and to John’s modern assembly plant outside Belfast which remained an island of calm, unscathed by the periodic exchange of gunfire and fire bombing that took place in the nearby streets of Belfast. Here workers from both sides of the fray came to work every day through the same doors and peacefully - even as comrades - built the car that became the legend of the movie BACK TO THE FUTURE. When you see how close it all came to working, you wonder how it could have gone wrong. And so, I guess, does John. But it was certainly a great try, and the lovely (for us, it was love at first sight) stainless steel, gull-winged DeLorean will live forever, if only on our motion picture screens. D A Pennebaker
By D A Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus View Movie Clip
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